Five games to October. Five games to cleaning out lockers. It’s going to be one of those two. With a win last night against a Mariners team the Astros have struggle to all season, combined with a Ranger loss against the Mets, the Astros and Rangers are tied atop the AL West at 78-79.
The Guardians and White Sox have 82 and 81 wins respectively, so it’s likely only one of Texas and Houston is going to be moving onto the postseason, whichever of the two notches more wins in these last 5 games (with the Astros holding the tiebreaker.)
Whoever comes out ahead will be probably be the #3 seed, and play the AL central runner-up in the wild card round.
Every game matters. Every pitch is high leverage, and tonight the Astros give the ball to rookie Ethan Pecko, who will probably be making his final appearance of the 2026 regular season.
I last profiled Pecko at the beginning of the month, after his first 3 starts of the season (and the first 3 starts of his career), where he faced 58 batters in August. It wasn’t pretty. Pecko was getting hit hard and hit often, with a hard hit ball rate of 51.3%: lower than the 1st percentile of MLB pitchers. That was not going to be sustainable in the majors.
Since then, in the month of September, he’s had 3 more pitching appearances: 1 start and 2 bulk relief appearances, where he faced another 58 batters. The hard hit ball rate has nearly been cut in half, and his walk rate is a third of what it was in August.
| Stat | August (3 App, 13.0 IP) | September (3 App, 15.2 IP) |
|---|---|---|
| Batters Faced | 58 | 58 |
| Hard Hit % | 51.3% | 27.9% |
| BB% | 15.5% | 5.2% |
| xBA | .277 | .200 |
| xOBP | .401 | .256 |
| xSLG | .517 | .357 |
| xOPS | .918 | .613 |
| xwOBA | .400 | .269 |
Source: Baseball Savant
The dramatic decrease in hard hit ball rate and walk rate has resulted in reduction of his xStats across the board. He’s gone from a pitcher against whom everyone has hit like Shohei Ohtani to a pitcher where everyone has hit like Marcus Semien (The 2026 model of Marcus Semien, that is.)
That will play at a major league level.
Granted, in September, 2 of the 3 teams Pecko faced were Arizona and Tampa Bay, who rank 22nd and 29th in MLB for Hard Hit%. In August, 2 of the 3 teams Pecko faced were the Mets and the Yankees who rank 2nd and 3rd in Hard Hit%.
The Mariners rank somewhere in between, 19th in MLB with a 38.4% Hard Hit rate.
AJ Blubaugh has probably been the Astros’ 2026 Rookie of the Year, but Pecko could take the silver by completing a strong September with a good start tonight.
He’ll go against right-handed George Kirby, 9-11 with a 4.24 ERA and 1.39 WHIP this season in 29 starts. It’s not been a good year for Kirby; he’s currently in line to record career worsts in ERA, WHIP, K/9 (7.6) and BB/9 (2.3).
This will be Kirby’s fourth start of the year against the Astros. The Astros struggled to get anything going against him in the first two, plating just 3 runs total across a combined 12.2 IP. In their last start against Kirby, however, the tagged him for 5 runs in 4.2 IP, with 8 hits and 3 walks, while striking out just twice. The Astros would go on to win that game in spectacular fashion with a 3 run walk-off home run in the 10th inning.
Astros @ Mariners Game Information and Gamethread Details
I hope you don’t like sleep and you do like national broadcasts. Tonight’s game starts even later than last night’s. The game will be broadcast at 9:10 p.m. CT on ESPN with radio coverage on KBME 790 AM.
Pick whatever “Sleepless in Seattle” pun you want here. Reader’s choice.
This post will be updated with starting lineup as they are made available. (That is, if it’s not so late that I forget to do it like I did yesterday. )
We hope you will join us and the rest of the Launch Angle community for the game! The turnout has been amazing on the TLA Discord Server for the game threads.
Join us again for today’s game. Just join the Discord server using this link: https://launch-angle.com/discord .
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If you’ve participated in game threads on other Astros sites in the past, you will probably see a lot of familiar names. Chat, lurk, do whatever! (But please say “hi”, so we know you’re not a bot.)
Feature photo from @astros on X, Source Link.
